A Pleasant Surprise

When I was checking mail today I saw that Jamey Boje had sent me a cool new header for my blog. Always nice to get a pleasant surprise. Thanks, Jamey.

A New Getting Involved Page

The new Get Involved page was posted on mozilla.org last week and we’ve had a good response so far. The page encourages people to contact us* about what they’d like to do and we’ve had:

• 7 people contact us about QA
• 2 people contact us about localization
• 2 people contact us about webdev
• 1 person contact us about coding
• 1 person contact us about stats analysis

There’s nothing to compare these numbers with, but having over a dozen people in a week express interest in contributing to Mozilla seems like a good thing. (Thanks to Tomcat for responding to most of those emails).

As I mentioned before, getting the new page up is only the beginning for what we could be doing. How do we get more people to this page? What’s the best way to help people get started when they express interest? Would having mentors for different community areas be useful?

If you’re interested in these questions, please come by our next contribute group call:

• Meeting time: Thursday, October 29 at 10:00 pacific
• Dial-in information: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 7600

* We’re also trying out volunteer referral sites such as VolunteerMatch and Volunteer Toronto as a way to bring people into the community.

Finding A New Path For Mozdev

mozdev needs your help! Please read below and let us know if you want to help find a new path for the site.

The mozdev.org site has been around since the early days of the Mozilla project (it just turned 9 years old) and is home to hundreds of active projects. It started out as a personal project and grew into a non-profit (the Mozdev Community Organization) that employs a small development team.

At one time, the site was the main place to go for Mozilla extensions and it served as an incubator for many of Firefox’s popular features and add-ons. The community has evolved though and hosting is no longer a big problem and AMO and Labs have taken over the distribution and incubation roles.

Even with these changes, there is a dedicated community that uses mozdev. The current board feels that we can serve these users best with a new approach and new faces. If you are interested in becoming a part of a new community council, please let us know.

A Better Internet

We just added a page to mozilla.org that describes what we mean when we talk about building a better Internet. This is a mix of recent discussions on blogs, some illustrations (including an illustrated moustache) and links to a few ways people can get more involved.

Boiling down the different blog posts about a better Internet and the open web seemed like a good way to provide an introduction to people about this concept, but also a good way to help us work through how we talk about things.

I’d be surprised if this page doesn’t evolve over the next few months as we rethink how we define the characteristics we believe are most important for a healthy Internet and how we concisely describe each.

If there’s something on this page that you think should be tweaked, added to, rewritten or removed, let us know.

More Mozilla-Based Application Logos

It’s time for a periodic update of the image of logos of Mozilla-based applications. This new image includes current apps, former apps and nods to the existence of unknown apps.

These dark matter apps include internal projects, projects under development or projects we don’t know about. We have hints that these are out there though. For instance, there’s a recent post about a XUL developer position for a lab management project that’s not released yet*.

* There’s a bug open about creating a better consultants page and this could make it easier to match Mozilla developers with people looking to build Mozilla-based apps. If anyone is interested in helping with this, let me know.

A Recruiting Engine for the Mozilla Community

We just finished the redesign of the Get Involved page. The final version refines several things from the second round including adding community icons to the list of opportunities, reducing the number of tabs, clarifying the remaining headings and tweaking the star design a bit more.

As we’ve worked on this, I’ve realized that the goal isn’t to design the perfect Get Involved page, but rather to set up a recruiting engine and this page is just one part of that.

The other part involves pulling together people from across the community to make contributing to Mozilla easier—that will include keeping this page updated but it should go beyond that as well.

If you’re interested in this page and about bringing more contributors into the project, please come to our first contribute group call this Thursday.

• Meeting time: Thursday, October 8 at 10:00 pacific
• Dial-in information: 1-800-707-2533, pin: 369, conf: 7600

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for October

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

Jolicloud transforms your netbook into a sophisticated web device that taps into the cloud to expand your computing possibilities and makes your computer and web part of the same experience.

TwitFactory is micro-blogging taken to the next step with Twitter and identi.ca support, folders, multiple accounts, filters, offline mode and many other great features.